#i just really liked the idea of hunter floating and my autistic little brain had to prove it with science because im silly like that

[an-animagi]

felt like talking about the hc that hunter floats, so here we go

personally, i believe that as long as there is enough water he is able to float on it because:

-he is primarily made out of wood, most species of which float as they are less dense than water and we can assume that palistrom wood shares this quality

-scales are extremely light, so the selkidomus scales would have little to no effect on his ability to float (if they were too heavy they would inhibit the swimming ability of the selkidomus)

-lungs are the only organ that can float, and the stonesleeper's ability to turn to stone shouldnt affect this as they are still lungs if theyre not in their stone form

-the bone of ortet would sink, as bones are denser than water. the only reason bodies float on water is because they swell up, but once the organic matter mostly rots away the bones sink to the bottom. however, a smaller bone would weigh less, and we can infer from the ribcage in belos's lab that caleb's ribs are the only bones left to make grimwalkers out of, and a single rib would weigh about 330-360g on average. on a large piece of wood, such as hunter's body (he is apparently 6 foot???? he is TALL) that small weight wont have much of an effect on the density of the wood, so the wood will still be able to float. (calculated using weight of british birch as a stand in for palistrom wood, but any wood should work. i went with 6ftX1ftX1ft as the measurements of hunter's body as i didnt really want to calculate the volume of a human as we have wierd gaps and stuff that would be hard to work with.)

-finally we have the galderstone, which is a rock. it should make him sink. rocks are heavy.

HOWEVER. there is this scene of bria carrying a massive sack filled with galderstones with absolutely no struggle.

yes, she struggled to pick it up, but that was over as soon as she got that bag over her shoulder. smile back onto her face, posture straight, walking at the same pace as she was before. she is in no way impacted by the weight of a massive bag filled with rocks. this could be explained as her being in the construction track, she may be physically stronger as she is constantly working with rocks and other constructions, but thats working with them using her magic, and in this scene there is no visible glow of her using magic which was clearly visible around her gloves in the previous scene.

using this, we can conclude that as galderstones are a magic rock, they may be much lighter than other rocks which would mean that a teenage girl can pickup a sack full of them and not struggle carrying it. this would also mean that they could potentially have a low enough density to either float on water or, similarly to the rib, not have an effect on the floating abilities of the wood.

you might want to argue that he sunk in the lake, but to that i say that he was possessed and had the weight of belos dragging him down. as soon as he was dead and belos stopped fighting for control camila was very easily able to pull him out of the water, which is difficult to do with a sixteen year old regardless of how malnourished they may be. especially considering the weight of wet clothes, and that yellow jumper would have absorbed a lot of water. from this i conclude that if not for belos he would have been able to float, as the belos gloop made him dense enough to sink but not dense enough for camila to struggle with pulling him to the surface.

please remember to take this with a pinch of salt, i mostly used common sense and google (and a half hour of overthinking galderstone logic in my kitchen one day, but thats irrelevant) to look at a popular headcanon and see if it makes sense. i saw a related post and wanted to make this in case anyone wanted to continue believing in the 'hunter floats' hc but this time with thought put into it

[edoro]

#‘​all rectangles are not squares but all squares are rectangles and this is one developmentally disrupted square’ op thank you SO MUCH #for putting this into words

#I love this so much I actually predicted baby Philip would be nonverbal and it’s the one thing hollow mind really vindicated for me

#so yeah give me more ‘early intervention for philip’ aus

#this boy needs sign language and anger coping skills

#I feel like this is a good place to also bring up how clumsy baby Philip is

#why do I feel like luz in particular would be very wary of him stumbling/falling and getting hurt (via @therealjanejackson)

yeah, honestly, the sentiment i’ve seen floating around that Hollow Mind somehow disproved the idea that Belos is extremely traumatized is weird - like, just personally, all of the people Like Him who i’ve had the misfortune to be personally acquainted with have all Been That Way because that’s how they respond to profound and chronic childhood trauma that occurred early enough it just sort of really disrupted their ability to form attachments and relationships to other people in a ‘normal’ way

(the rest of this got incredibly long and is just me kind of rambling mostly about The Emperor’s Autism and a little bit about The Emperor’s Trauma so under a cut it goes to spare your dashboards)

(which you know is where our handy little saying comes in - most people who are traumatized do not go on to act like Belos, but everyone i’ve ever met who acts like him is absolutely doing it because they’ve been traumatized, which is not an excuse but it’s good to understand the actual reason behind the behavior)

and my personal projection about his motives and personality aside, like, we literally see the dude and his brother playing while some kind of mob violence occurs a couple dozen feet away? things like “witnessing violent community persecution/vigilante mob executions as a child” don’t suddenly stop being traumatic bc the person they happen to grows up to be a bad person

(and the fact of his upbringing just uh really implies a level of physical and spiritual abuse as just kind of the default, and it definitely Means Something imo that we see his brother but we never see their parents even in a background shot, so, you know...)

but also yeah like. he’s so autistic the Wittebanes are SO autistic. Hunter is way too autistic for his uncle-who-is-technically-genetically-his-brother to be neurotypical. and you just KNOW Hunter got the “raised by undx’d autistic guardian” experience 

where they do so much of the exact same shit and have so many of the exact same problems but because Belos thinks this is Just Normal, he tells Hunter that, so Hunter also has no idea that his behavior and feelings and sensory experiences aren’t typical.

(definitely think that Belos has arranged his entire life around meeting his own personal sensory needs - that castle is so big and open and dim and quiet

which, some of that is definitely the intimidation factor, but this is also a man who spent years living in a cave and tbh i’m about 80% convinced he just built the castle around the cave lair, so, you know, i’m extrapolating a bit about what he might like in his personal environment

probably finds the Owl House wildly overstimulating on top of the constant mental overload of 400 years’ worth of cartoon villain actions stuffed into that 6 year old brain)

also yeah i love that you brought up how clumsy baby Philip is - his gross motor control and proprioception are just hot garbage, kid is staggering and stumbling around all over the place and blithely bouncing off walls and furniture

it’s fine, he’s fine, he barely even notices - can definitely see Luz being concerned about it, and tbh everyone finds it a lot more concerning that he just legitimately doesn’t seem to notice/care/react to giving himself visible injuries...

given the enduring fixation on like, childhood symbols - the mask, the witch-hunt games made tragically real, the thing where he’s cloned his brother 20+ times to be his living security blanket/stress toy - i see him as very much the “needs things to be the same, hates transitions and abrupt changes” type of autistic

he seems to love his routines and complex bureaucratic systems and familiar personal symbols/objects and Everything Being Just How He Wants It

as an adult and especially an adult who exerts a ton of control over his sensory environment he is able to be significantly more flexible and has greater emotional reserves to cope with being upset about this sort of thing - he’s got quite a lot of fine control over his face and tone and mood, but one definitely gets the impression it’s very much an intentional effort all the time

stuck in 6 year old brain, though? frustrated about the whole situation, frantic to get back to his plans which are so close to being ready, furious and humiliated by his own helplessness and the need to keep up the ruse of just being a child? mentally and physically overwhelmed and overstimulated? Oh Boy Is He Gonna Be Exhibiting Some Behaviors. 

feel like he’s the kind of guy who ate like, four (4) foods all the time and those were The Only Foods He Could Eat. then he ended up in a whole different dimension where he couldn’t even digest half the food there anyway and boy was that a nightmare.

and now his taste palate has gotten reset to 1600s colonial foods! what fun! feel like Eda’s gonna shrug and say “he’ll eat when he’s hungry” after he spurns everything she offers and then with dismay realize like, two days later, that apparently no he won’t and oops gotta figure something out here

just an endless process of “lmao of course the Emperor’s inner child is a fucking brat - oh no wait there’s like some legit emotional/developmental issues going on here, huh”

get in losers we’re reparenting Philip Wittebane, maybe it’ll improve him somewhat as a person

thinking SO hard about that “Babybel gets transported outside of his own mindscape with Luz and Hunter and ends up stuck in six year old form” concept

i want him to have adult Belos’s memories and knowledge but he’s physically occupying the body and brain of a small child so like his cognitive development level is really lagging behind what he’s used to (which wasn’t a problem in the mindscape where it runs on dream rules, but unfortunately,)

he’s scheming but he’s also having a hard fucking time because like you will never. ever convince me. that Philip Wittebane is not a deeply traumatized man. all rectangles are not squares but all squares are rectangles and brother? this is one developmentally disrupted square.

so anyway he’s got four hundred years of being fucked up and evil crammed into a six year old brain and he’s furious and terrified and overwhelmed and going to get put in shitty mindbaby jail for sure.

serenely choosing to interpret the fact that he never said anything in Babybel form but then immediately would not shut up in Belos form is because he was nonverbal for a very long time in childhood* and therefore, not possessing several centuries’ worth of verbal communication workarounds**, he can’t talk to anyone in the Owl House

they give him a big sketchbook and a bunch of colored pencils and markers, because if there’s one thing the Owl House has in abundance it’s craft supplies

he spends a while being profoundly frustrated by six year old motor skills and total lack of most of the artistic muscle memory he’s used to but starts to work something out that doesn’t totally disgust him

i just want him to without really thinking draw a familiar face, look at it, and get hit with 400 years of missing (and recreating and raising and programming and using and being betrayed again by and murdering) Caleb but, and this is the crucial part, with the emotional and cognitive capacity of a six year old

and burst into furious tears

(*people were not, i think, kind about this)

(*actually there are a couple of notable occasions as Belos where he gets confronted with something he clearly doesn’t have either a preplanned speech or a well-oiled social script to respond to and just. does not say anything.)